Welcome to Trouble Free Pool

We would like to welcome you to TFP, the webs leading Pool related website. We invite you to please Register to create a new account. Doing this will give you full access to the forums, where you will be able to receive personalized advice concerning your pool. We hope to see you soon!

Pool Opened - 7 Bags of Shock and No Chlorine

Hi, I hope someone can give me advice and I apologize as I'm sure it's been answered a lot but I just can't seem to find it on here.

We opened our 16x32 inground pool on Friday and were given 3 bags of shock to start. Shock was added and NO reading yesterday. I brought the water to be tested and was told to purchase an additional 4 bags of shock. Shock was put in yesterday afternoon and today there's still no reading. PH is a little off but still in normal range and everything else is LOW.

After 7 bags of shock in 24 hours I would expect to at least have some reading. The pool is cloudy, cleared for a few hours yesterday and now back to cloudy, I can no longer see the drain in the deep end which is my barometer for a clear pool.

I'm doing some reading on the BBB method and I'm absolutely not opposed to it, I just never heard of it before because our pool store has always been more than helpful. This weekend, not so much.

Re: Pool Opened - 7 Bags of Shock and No Chlorine

A full set of test results would be really helpful.

Ideally, those readings would come from your own test kit.

Most likely, the cloudiness is bleached-out algae. That's normally the stage between green sludge and sparkling, clear water. So, check out this thread, and follow the directions there. You're just starting out where most people would be after 3 days is all. Everything else applies. And if you don't get it cleared soon, you will have a green pool when it starts warming up.

16K freeform gunite with spa; Pentair 4000 DE filter; Century Whisperflow 1 HP; Pentair Minimax heater.Troublefree does not mean Maintenancefree. It's like brushing your teeth: You can spend a couple minutes a day and pennies a week or go to the dentist once a year and spend several thousand dollars.A pool is like a pet - you have to feed it every day, even the days you don't want to play with it!

Re: Pool Opened - 7 Bags of Shock and No Chlorine

There are basically two sorts of powdered "shock products". One is cal-hypo, the other is dichlor (label is really long you can figure it out). One adds stabilizer to the pool with the chlorine, the other adds calcium with the chlorine. Or you can get bleach and just add chlorine without the other stuff.

Now, you MAY need that other stuff. OTOH, you may already have way too much of either or both and more could be a real problem. You really need to test to know.

Re: Pool Opened - 7 Bags of Shock and No Chlorine

Thank you everyone for your answers. I waited on replying as I wanted to have the water tested professionally to get the correct numbers. I'm at a total of 14 bags of shock now and still no chlorine. Any suggestions would be helpful as I don't want to keep throwing money at the problem. There must be a better solution! Should I just use bleach?

Re: Pool Opened - 7 Bags of Shock and No Chlorine

This isn't related to your main issue, but you should raise the PH to around 7.2 to 7.5 soon. Other than that you numbers look reasonable. CH is a tiny bit high, but not a big deal.

It sounds like you have ammonia in the water. A fairly small amount of ammonia requires a lot of chlorine to remove. The only thing to do is to keep adding chlorine. You can get an idea of just how much chlorine you are going to need by either doing an ammonia test, or by doing an extreme chlorine demand test.